Subj: Re: One of the worst enemies of Iron Man, a well-known name among fans and, yet, often forgotten as one of the greatest foes ...Posted: Sat Feb 03, 2018 at 06:28:50 pm EST (Viewed 70 times)

Reply Subj: Re: One of the worst enemies of Iron Man, a well-known name among fans and, yet, often forgotten as one of the greatest foes ...Posted: Sat Feb 03, 2018 at 05:16:52 pm EST (Viewed 68 times)

They actually made Stark Industries a living breathing thing from the gate guard to the secretary to many others. It showed Stark as a mixture of capitalism and noblesse oblige.

Exactly! I applaud them for that. Stan Lee, Larry Lieber, and Don Heck accomplished much the same thing. In the beginning, Happy Hogan and Pepper Potts were the same sort of characters as the gate guard and the secretary you mention in your comment. And yes, noblesse oblige is part of the dynamic. A more American phrase might be civic duty. The successful have often felt this obligation. One modern manifestation of this impulse is the Rotary Club.The Rotary Club according to Wikipedia

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It's always easy to show the evil business because so many if not all of them irl are...but it would be nice to see a more altruistic Business model that worked with Stark leading the charge, dealing with those wanting to destroy science, innovation, independent thought and so on.

Productive and pro-social are sufficient for the alter ego role, in my opinion, though Tony would very likely be a Rotarian or some equivalent. Civic duty (or noblesse oblige if you like) would be natural for him, as it is for Bruce Wayne. I'm shying away from the last part of your sentence due to the political implications because, sadly, in America, such ideas as you raise at the end of your sentence have become politicized.

But at the start of your sentence you mention evil businesspersons (I'm assuming you meant to type "persons" or "people" or perhaps "men") and yes, evil of that sort runs rampant in our real world as it does in the Marvel reality. That's where IRON MAN comes in. Roxxon, Hammer, Alchemax - these are the iconic evil business empires in the Marvel reality. Tony would find them particularly offensive. They represent the antipode of everything he stands for. They turn what ought to be honorable (ambition, pride, spirit of excellence, audacity, energy, vision, creativity, intelligence, discipline, experience, skill) into something despicable, vile, loathesome, noxious. They are a perversion, a corruption of everything he admires, aspires to, and holds dear. They are his natural enemies. He would fight them to his last breath. And because they don't hesitate to kill and destroy, he would garb himself in iron.